Drawing 1; Part 5; South West group day with Dr Michele Whiting – “Language in Drawing” – 23.5.20

Need to look out for workshops from Michele on academic writing – they will be in two parts, and will come out initially through the Fine Art pathway.

Michele gave a very interesting talk about the history of drawing, what it was/is and what it is for, and how it has changed over time – I understand that she intends to publish the subject matter of this talk in the future and so we have been asked not to share details here. I hope it’s OK for me to say that I was encouraged that she referenced Albrecht Durer and Vija Celmins in there, so I felt I was on the right lines with my Part 5 investigation!

I was also interested in her own working method, which comes out of walking (links to my study in Part 5 of Lydia Halcrow’s work and, of course, John Virtue – see separate blog posts within Part 5). Her method actually uses the bodily motion – she will walk in her studio in order to trigger memories of what she has observed whilst out walking. She also (as advocated by Vija Celmins) likes to test out materials until she feels she really understands them and what they can do.

She made the distinction between “output” – basically all the experimental work you are doing – and “outcome”, which is your final piece. If you are fine with your output but freeze at the point of making your outcome (guilty as charged), and you think that one of your outputs is better, then don’t panic, but take that one output and investigate what makes it work for you – how can you build this into your outcome?

We went into some warming/loosening up activities, which she says are always useful, amongst other things, when you are feeling a bit tight (artistically, not alcoholically).

First task was to take a sketchbook, start at our front door, and walk around your house drawing (it was left up to us what we drew) – we were supposed to end up back at the front door, but I have an old 3-storey Victorian house with lots of rooms so I arranged to end up in my studio, which is under the eaves, as we only had 30 min for the exercise. Also, you were meant to keep your pencil on the page. There was no time for thinking about how you were going to tackle this, so I ended up doing one quick thing in each place. When you’ve finished it’s interesting to look back and see what you chose on the spur of the moment; I seem to have gone for lots of round things – wheel, lamps, statuettes, taps and shower head, garden chair, more lamps, globe and finials. Sure that says something about my psyche. Apparently, some of the other students didn’t progress beyond their hallway! – so just goes to prove how much stuff you have to hand which you can draw – no more thinking “I don’t know what to draw”.

Second activity was to take something simple from your kitchen – I chose a small squat jug – as subject matter. Tight timing again here – think it was something like 15 min to draw the subject 10 times whilst looking at it and your sketchbook, then 15 min to draw it 10 times looking at the subject but NOT your sketchbook, then 10 min to draw it 5 times looking at your sketchbook but NOT the subject OR your previous drawings. For me this proved the value of both the repetition and that exercise of not looking at your drawing page, which I did earlier in the course but had slightly forgotten; I was really struggling with the handle of the jug at first, but somehow knowing that you had to draw it without being able to see it really focused me in, and these are my final efforts.

Third task was using an object which was of significance to me and which I could hold in my hand (I chose an empty glass perfume bottle, which had been the first bottle of perfume my husband ever bought me). We had first to hold the object in our non-dominant hand (Michele used the term “unorthodox”) and had 15 min to draw it with our dominant (orthodox) hand, being able to look at it for reference. Then we had to put the first drawing out of sight, hold the object in our dominant (orthodox) hand, and draw it from memory (i.e. being able to feel it but not look at it) with our non-dominant (unorthodox) hand. Phew! The drawings in my case were fairly similar, as of course I have been using my left hand a lot after breaking the shoulder of my dominant right hand.

After sharing our work, Michele went on to suggest some other freeing/loosening up activities we could try out in our own time:

Make yourself a box of tools which you have created – you don’t have to buy everything, you can make tools, so get inventive.
Take a page and make a record of that day – you can draw, map write – the only rule is to have the date in the centre.
Make a series of drawings of your face by feeling it but not looking – don’t have to do a full face, can do sections, use either hand…
In your immediate environment, just pile stuff into a quick assemblage, don’t be over fussy, and just draw it.
Do 50 drawings of the same object in 4 hours – see how your drawings change.
Take a phrase and make an image using the letters as many times as you like.
Make tonal range strips to explore your medium.

We had a quick discussion about assessment and issues arising from the change to digital submission. Points arising:

Choosing your blog posts – you will end up with only a small array – tutors were missing out on evidence of “discernment”, but this will show the assessors your thinking and priorities.
Someone had tabulated their blog posts, referring to link and learning outcome. You could put links to a url or, if not confident with this, could make them into a pdf. You can reorganise written work from your blog. You can put your chosen blog posts into one document for ease of reference for the assessor.
Clarity, flagging things up is really important.

Drawing 1; Part 5; Extracts from my sketchbook

Several extracts have been included in earlier blog posts, so this is a flavour of other on-site sketches done in my A5 Seawhite sketchbook, using drawing pens, which I took on the walk for most visits.

All of these sketches were done on-site; some were quick jottings and just a few lines and marks to remind me of a moment; others are more developed, with annotations of light direction, things seen but not drawn, and so on. The focus of most of the drawings (particularly the later ones when I had decided what the subject-matter of my outcome was to be) was on river-bank trees and flora, water movement and reflections, and the structure of rocks protruding from the river bed.

This was very much an on-the-spot record-keeping sketchbook; more experimental work was done at home in a larger watercolour book, the contents of which are included in earlier blog posts.

Drawing 1; Part 5; an outcome for my John Virtue/Albrecht Durer work

WHAT?

Further to my last blog post trying to pin down where I was going with this investigation…….

…I had decided to take my series of 8 detailed black and white drawings, in the style of Durer’s etchings (which I had produced by making rapid on-site sketches and then working into them in black ink with shellac following the method of John Virtue) and to tessellate them in a cross arrangement – also in the style of John Virtue (see e.g. his Landscape No. 75, 1987-89, black ink, shellac, gouache, pencil and charcoal on paper, laid on board. Private collection, London).

I had tried several other layouts, but this one I found the most balanced (symmetry appeals to me), and the pictures still describe the sweep of a view from top left to bottom right.

SO WHAT?

I tried them against a blank support, which is what John Virtue does – his look very stark, as did mine, and very “stand alone”, whereas I wanted mine to be part of a larger composition where I could show (a) that these drawings were part of a larger whole, and (b) a contrast between my tight, careful lines and looser, more flowing lines. I made a very rapidly-executed design of moving water, drawing just with the dropper of an indigo FW acrylic ink bottle and a water spray, freely mark-making to convey river water in some of its various moods. Virtue’s later work shows large gestural Zen-like strokes, and this was how I felt whilst doing it. For this part of the work I didn’t copy anything, just worked from memory of all the earlier observations and sketches I had done to guide the marks. Once this was dry, I mounted my tessellation in the centre.

NOW WHAT?

My husband describes the outcome as “very interesting – a lot to look at”. I feel that sums it up – I was very much in two minds when I laid the drawings on the background before sticking – was it too busy? A bit incongruous having black drawings on a blue background?

Having lived with it for a few days and considered it, I am satisfied that it:

Combines elements of the styles of both John Virtue and Albrecht Durer
Shows different methods of using my chosen medium
Incorporates tight right-handed drawings with my new-found large, free and expressive left-handed drawings!
Makes the viewer work and move around the picture to assimilate everything contained within – it has the eye jumping from the free marks to the tight drawings and back over and over
As far as subject matter is concerned, it combines the features of the river I had picked out as defining the essence of the river – water, bank and bed – and hence goes some way towards answering my initial question – “What is this river?”

Drawing 1; Part 5; Where have I moved on to?

Quite a bit of reflecting has gone on as a result of a flurry of group discussion sessions. I feel I have been blundering around somewhat, largely because of my very wide initial question which sent me off in myriad different directions. Thinking has now gone as follows:

– I have really come down to being able to define what I actually want my question to be: how can I depict the essence of the river water in a drawing/series of drawings?

– This slight obsession I have (from looking at the Hockney iPad drawings – see separate blog posts) about the various layers of the river (river bed – water- reflections on surface – movement of surface – things on/over the surface) has to inform my final outcome.

– My first potential solution to this was some sort of collage-type image, where I would do a loose, fairly abstract depiction of the movement of the water in the style of John Virtue, and overlay it in parts with small detailed vignettes, in the style of Albrecht Durer; these would in part be cut out in water-drop shapes from my drawings resulting from the Tyga Herme exercise (see separate blog post) and arranged in a semi-tessellated pattern. This would combine my two strands which I had been following: loose semi-abstract work versus detailed representational work.

– Something was still niggling though. We sat the other day in the sun on a tiny island in the river (we went for a picnic lunch under the trees), and I did a couple of ink drawings:

…the first being a shady section of river right in front of us..

and the second was the river coming through a rocky section in full sun about ten yards to the left. Both just use FW acrylic inks in sepia and indigo applied with the stopper, spread about with a water pen and spray and drawn into with a black ink drawing pen. They are very different, which reinforced to me the differing characters of the river just over the space of a few yards; one is about dappled light and sometimes seeing the river bed, while the other is all action and surface.

This set me thinking about my layers again, and finding some way of showing this ever changing and sometimes transparent aspect of the water.

I took a couple of scrap pieces of glassine and drew on them with ink; on one I did some “river bed” marks,

and on the other some “surface” marks. It was a quick experiment and I was fairly free with the ink, which I put on with a Chinese brush – fortunately I had stuck the edges of the glassine down as it buckled up considerably and made the images very blurry, although they did settle down a bit once dry. My idea was to overlay the “river bed” sheet with the “surface” sheet and see if the idea of layers could be achieved. Mixed results…..

……when one sheet was just placed over the other like this the effect was not very clear (left).

However, when the two sheets were overlaid and held up to the light, the effect of layering was much clearer (below right).

I felt I was onto something here, although glassine wasn’t the right support. More thinking needed…

In the light of all the above, I decided that I wouldn’t cut up the Durer-style Tyga Helme exercise drawings after all, but would do what I had originally intended to do with them, which was to make them into a John Virtue-ish tessellation

I tried out various possible layouts, as John Virtue had done,

and decided that I liked them best in the cross – they run in a sweep from top row left to bottom row right. My plan is therefore to experiment with a background (I’m thinking either plain white so as not to detract from the drawings, or maybe a light streaky indigo wash to suggest river) on which to mount the drawings. Watch this space.

And I’ve also been thinking about PVA glue as a support for my transparent layers…another space to watch.

Fine Art Group discussion with Dan Robinson – “Mountains and Mythologies” – 18.5.20

This was an interesting discussion – Dan had provided a lot of stimulus material for us to look at and load up our thoughts and own resources onto a padlet beforehand, which is becoming increasingly useful now I am beginning to get the hang of it. The subject matter was evocative, the resources quite “out there” and thought provoking…..but in the end we talked largely about our processes and how to frame a good question – which I don’t think any of us particularly expected, but was interesting and helpful in a completely different way.

Points arising:

Dan started off by explaining his setting of the task and his framing of questions to start us thinking; this type of activity is very useful for research. Coming up with a good question can be key to help you apply for things, e.g. finding for a research fellowship at a university (Dan did this). It’s a good way to pull together information, ideas different, media and disciplines, e.g. writing, performance.
The assemblage of information which as a group we had generated on the padlet is a way of showing different kinds of knowledge,
Looking at people’s work digitally throws up questions of scale which we can either play with or fight with – it will affect how people read the work. In a sequence of images, one leads into an expectation of what the next will be like (which may be quite wrong!)
A quote from Roman Signer: “Incredible things happen in a moment.”
When coming up with a question for research, it’s good to have a wide one, but then you can then break it down into sub questions to explore – so, in a dissertation, this might form subheadings – e.g., in my case, I might be exploring particular media or portraying a particular aspect of the river (e.g. my thing about layers). Ask yourself; “What will this project ask?” By asking questions you are embracing the fact that you don’t yet know – to give yourself a genuine journey of discovery.
Collage – cutting things up and then moving them around – a very useful artistic device.
Choosing something that gives you a constraint – e.g. I’m only going to use a 2B pencil – can lead to some very creative work.
It can also be a good idea when framing your question to list the things that you will not do.

Photography lecture by Anna Fox – “Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Photography” 16.5.20

This was very kindly opened out to other groups by the Thames Valley group – I was interested in what Holly (see SW group hangout blog entry) had said about photography so thought I would turn up to this Zoom meeting and see what I could learn.

Very interesting and chatty lady. Brief notes:

Her text books: “Langford’s Basic Photography” and “Behind the Image” (research into photography)
She is taking part in a project called “Women in photo” run by a group called Fast Forward
Fiction is her inspiration. She derives ideas from the work of Cartier-Bresson and De Guerre.
A photo goes at a speed of 1/125 of a second – the eye can’t see this, so the image captured in a photo is not something you would “see”
Historically, photos began to be staged rather than “real”, see e.g. Edward Curtis and Dorothea Langer, and the question of paying the subjects was very controversial at the start, although it happens a lot now
One of her students used Old Master images, e.g. Vermeer, as inspiration for his own work, and he would try to set up staged poses to produce a similar scene
She collects bits of texts and photographs and then marries them together – she tried taking photos to specifically illustrate a piece of text but this didn’t work for her. She says that, if you choose to add text, it should be not too direct, not an afterthought, and as important as the image – so need to give thought to layout, typography, etc.

She shared with us the making of a piece called “My Mother’s Cupboards, My Father’s Words”. Her father’s words were actually quite abusive – she was very open with us in talking about the family’s experiences of living with her father and their various reactions to him, which was quite moving

Drawing 1; Part 5; South West Group hangout crit 11.5.20

Nice small group (me, Holly and Ruth) so time for some good discussion.

Holly is doing photography and has a landscape project where she has to produce a group or series of a dozen photos evoking the sublime – she has some lovely circular images which she is going to crop and make them look like planets by making them into vignettes. She said something interesting about photography as a discipline as against fine art – artists start with nothing and add stuff to make an image, whereas photographers start with loads of information and remove stuff to make an image. She had put up a draft of her artist’s statement explaining that she was going for round images as if someone was looking at a picture of a landscape through a magnifying glass, which rather chimed with my thoughts about putting some of my smaller drawings into my bigger drawings.

Ruth was doing illustration and had an exercise to do making comparisons between a portrait and a caricature (both of which she had to generate). We talked about life drawing and a website – lineofaction.com – was recommended (I did have a quick look but couldn’t immediately find it…?)

I talked about my current project and the way I have two strands to my work, the loose and large abstract representations and the small tight detailed illustrations. We talked about how to combine these – Holly suggested putting the abstract within a detailed drawing, or vice versa. She mentioned another student, Jane Coxhill, who is also looking at depicting water, so I have emailed her and am awaiting a reply.

Drawing 1; Part 5; Albrecht Durer (with a little bit of Lucian Freud…)

What?

This is Durer’s famous rhinoceros – I’ve seen the print in the British Museum, and this is a drawn study for it in pen and brown ink, made in 1515, © The British Museum….

…..and here’s his Large Piece of Turf, 1503, watercolour and gouache on paper, Albertina, Vienna, Austria….

…and my personal favourite, St Jerome in his study, 1514, engraving, also in the British Museum; we have a print of this on our study wall (by way of encouragement).

What I love about Durer’s drawings is the minute observation that he has obviously made, his use of light and dark, and the detail he includes, including conveying differing textures by varying his marks. When I first looked at his work in an earlier Part of this unit I said I wanted to look at his work more closely, so glad I finally got here!

So What?

I wanted to have a go at using ink lines carefully, with varying thicknesses and types of mark, to make a controlled and closely observed drawing. I eventually want to be able to apply such precise mark-making to my drawings of the river and its banks so that I can capture specific details in a highly representational drawing, possibly with a view to contrasting this with looser, more flowing marks depicting the moving water.

Now What?

The subject of my attempt, rather weirdly, was a dead owl (we think) which appeared by the side of the path one day – insides had been totally removed by something, guessing fox, so all that was left was the inside of the exterior, if that makes sense, and disorganised feathers, plus a beak visible. I had a really good look but didn’t want to pick it up or bring it home (having enough trouble avoiding one type of bug without accruing others) so took some close-up photos to draw from – and the carcass was gone next day – am assuming the fox thought there was something else to be had from it.

I had a go using a mixture of sepia and black Faber-Castell Pitt drawing pens of varying thicknesses on A3 cream cartridge paper; my aim was to use the sepia to suggest the actual colouring of the bird whilst bringing in the black to help me build form.

I think the outcome makes a striking image – although it was one of those things that you only want to do a bit at a time before you start going cross-eyed – and have learned that a bird like this has an amazing number of different types of feather. It challenged me to develop my range of mark-making to depict these textures and also to create form, and I think the thick black lines work well to ground the carcass.

Fascinating as it was to draw, I did wonder if I was being just a little strange to be drawn to such a thing….but was comforted by Durer’s drawing of a detached bird’s wing – Wing of a Roller, 1512, watercolour and gouache on vellum. Albertina, Vienna, Austria….

…..and that very same evening, leafing through that excellent book from the Royal Drawing School, Ways of Drawing, 2019, Thames and Hudson, London, I found this drawing by Lucian Freud entitled Rotted Puffin, 1944, conte and coloured crayon on paper. Private collection, © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgman Images.

I think this is even more weird than mine, as at least mine was cleanly eaten, not rotted! – the book does refer to the drawing as a “…compelling, disquieting image…”, due in part to the angle of the bird’s head combined with the “..carefully, intensely observed lines..”

I think that my style of drawing resembles the Freud work more than the Durer but, having completed a complex piece like this, I now feel more prepared to tackle other highly detailed drawings of the river and its environs with the same level of close observation and an expanded toolkit of marks.

Drawing 1; Part 5; an exercise from Tyga Helme on “Being Present”

WHAT?

In one of my new favourite books, Royal Drawing School (int. Julian Bell), 2019, Ways of Drawing, Thames & Hudson, London, there is a suggestion for an exercise from Tyga Helme. I decided to give it a go for three reasons:

I was drawn to her style, which is a bit scrappy and scribbly, rather like mine – see this example, Behind Knole, 2015, ink on paper
The exercise sounded as if it would get me past the problem of being slightly overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in a view that there is to draw
It had the potential to generate drawings which I could tessellate (as per John Virtue and Lydia Halcrow)

She suggests that you take a stack of 8 x 8cm squares of paper to a scene you would like to draw from. You take the first square, look at one thing in the view which catches your eye, draw it (she suggests for 3 min, but I wanted to really make myself home in on key features so I only allowed myself 90 sec), then turn over to the next page, draw the next thing that catches your eye, and so on. She says that, at the end you can put them together and be able to see “..where your eye naturally travelled and what you reacted to.” Her example in the book looks thus: (Tyga Helme, untitled, 2014, ink on paper).

The idea is just to be present and totally focused on your looking and mark making without worrying about what the finished piece will be.

SO WHAT?

I had a go on the little shingle beach in the river, looking along the facing bank which has quite dramatic trees with exposed roots down to the water, and looked in a clockwise sweep past a shoal of rocks in the middle of the river and up the nearer bank. Here are my rapid sketches in order:

A couple are very sketchy and I had to look twice to work out what they were when I got them home!!

However, John Virtue used to make really scrappy sketches on location and then come home and draw into them with ink, and so I emulated his method, drawing into my sketches with a dip pen and black Indian ink with shellac from photo references which I had made to back up my drawings, but always keeping my focus on the landscape feature which had originally caught my eye.

I have enjoyed doing these drawings, trying to look with a forensic eye as demonstrated by Albrecht Durer (see separate blog post) and to use different types and weights of mark to convey tone and a sense of depth.

Also this is an excellent exercise for those like me who need a bit of structure in order to decide what to draw first! – it gives me permission to pick something without worrying that I might be leaving all the other stuff out.

NOW WHAT?

I feel much more confident about going out and drawing in the landscape without dithering – just pick the first thing which catches my eye – there is a reason why this is so, and I need to respond to that.
I now have a series of drawings which I can consider tessellating (see John Virtue blog) into a coherent composition; I should like to incorporate this if possible within a larger, more abstract drawing of the river water in order to contrast this controlled range of marks with more fluid and gestural marks.

Drawing 1; Part 5; Where am I now??

I am pausing in my investigation to try and draw thoughts together.

I haven’t at all followed my initial plan, which was to work through a stated list of artists, try out their work, and see what resonated with me as being the best way of achieving my goal, namely, to describe this stretch of the river in a drawing.

That’s not quite true – I started on the plan but was quickly diverted into a focus on particular key artists whose work I am finding most helpful – so I am deciding here to “park” experimenting with maps, diagrams and land art, and the artists associated with those. I am also “parking” Kurt Jackson, which is quite annoying as he is a favourite of mine and one I should like to come back to, perhaps in the Painting module – but I think I have more than enough to work with here and any extra would just confuse me more than I’m confused already.

So, which influences am I keeping?

It really comes down to four, although they are quite contradictory in style and somehow I need to resolve that conundrum. Lydia Halcrow and Tyga Helme have very been helpful to me on the path, but I am sticking with:

Vija Celmins and David Hockney for water. This is a rather odd pairing, but they go together as helping me with my depiction of water, which has become (unexpectedly) a real fascination. Vija Celmins made me look at it carefully and try to analyse it in all its complexity. David Hockney is here because he led me into iPad drawings and the idea of layers. I freely confess that I cannot for the life of me understand how to make my iPad drawing app work as it’s supposed to, but I do get that it works on the principle of superimposing layers, which has made me really think about all the layers you have to consider when drawing water: the underlying rocks etc, which often you can’t see, but sometimes you can; the reflections on the water; the surface movements (with consequent impact on the reflections); and anything overhanging/above the water.
Albrecht Durer for his amazingly detailed drawings using line and tone, which I am determined I will be able to emulate eventually if only I can look better.
John Virtue. His tessellations initially pulled me in – I have an infernally organising nature – and then I was astounded by his sudden jump to these huge free loose black and white paintings. I have been reading (in Paul Moorhouse, 2019, John Virtue, Albion Barn Publishing, Oxford and Ridinghouse, London) about his London pictures, which have moved on again, are often very dark and suddenly, as if a mist clears momentarily, includes very detailed snatches of drawing – such as this one, which is a section of Landscape No 710, 2003-4, black ink, shellac and emulsion on canvas, 305 x 610cm, Queensland Art Gallery.

So, somehow, I think I want to:

Practise more drawing of water, which can be in quite an abstract way
Practise more detailed drawings of landscape features
Marry the two together somehow!